At 05:31 UTC, on August 6, 2012 – right on schedule, and right on target, after a 560 million kilometer voyage across space – the Mars Science Laboratory, affectionately named Curiosity, touched down on Mars.

In an amazing display of engineering, the incredibly complex and difficult Martian atmospheric entry apparently went without a hitch. The heat shield worked perfectly, the parachutes deployed, the rockets fired, the skycrane lowered the rover, and after eight months in space after launch, the rover set wheels down on the Red Planet.

And within minutes, we got pictures! This was one of the first received from the rover:

WOW! This image is from the Hazard Avoidance Camera, and is actually pretty low res, but still. The camera has a clear protective cover on it to keep out dust blown up when the rover set down, and you can see some dust has stuck to it, muddying the picture (the cover will be ejected soon and we’ll get clearer pictures). But even through the schmutz you can see the landscape, mostly smooth with small rocks nearby. You can also see one of the rover’s wheels on the bottom.

Even more dramatic is this one:

Awwwwww, yeah. That would be the shadow of the newest citizen of Mars right there.

What an amazing thing, to watch this whole landing unfold live before our eyes. I was in a live video hangout with Fraser Cain, Pamela Gay, Amy Shira Teitel, Ian O’Neill, Dave Mosher, and many others, and when the final minutes drew near, the tension in the control room at JPL was palpable. I’m not sure how many nail-biting space events I’ve sat through, but they never get old, and they never get easier.

And how did we find out Curiosity was down? When we heard the control room people erupt into cheers through Amy’s live feed (and also by the look on Amy’s face).

My profound and sincere congratulations and thanks to NASA, to JPL, and to the hundreds of men and women who have spent years working on this one-ton, three meter-long mobile interplanetary chemistry lab!

… but after all that tension, all those incredibly complex maneuvers, and all that celebration, remember this: the adventure for Curiosity has just begun. It will now explore the environment of Gale crater, a 150 kilometer-wide impact site on Mars. It will examine the rocks, studying their composition and their history, adding to our understanding of how Mars has changed over the eons. Where did its water go? What was the surface like billions of years ago? And of course, the biggie: was the surface of Mars, one of our nearest neighbors in space, ever habitable?

All that is to come over the rover’s two (Earth) year mission. For now, it’s OK to sit back and soak up the fact that we humans flung a bit of ourselves across the solar system. We reached across space, and did something amazing.

Thanks again for that google hang out!
How luck we are this day in age to not only witness something as amazing and historically significant instantly, at the same time as those involved, but at the same time to have the opportunity to have so much explained to us at the same time by experts like yourself, thanks to the internet.
I wonder what Carl Sagan would thing about all this.
No, that’s i lie. He would love every minute of it.

Waal, obviously it’s a guv’mint conspiracy – the shadows are all rong and all – and what about that flag?

Great work by everyone involved. When you work for so many years without really seeing anything working and then you launch your work into space to land on another planet, it’s always great to know it got there and your work is all worthwhile.

Excellent! I held my breath to the very last minute, daring not to hope.

I do wonder, however, if anyone here knows about the bandwidth to Earth from Curiosity. I also wonder, where is the imagery from MARDI stored? In the rover itself? It must be quite a lot of data, will it take years to even get it to Earth?

What César said, thanks to everyone in the hangout for some great commentary. And congratulations NASA and JPL!

At 05:31 UTC, on August 6, 2012 … the Mars Science Laboratory, affectionately named Curiosity, touched down on Mars.

This was a point of confusion between me and my friend who I was watching with. Surely it touched down at 05:17? I kept insisting – no, no, it is supposed to touch down at 05:31, and we have to wait another 14 minutes for confirmation – but then everyone at JPL erupted in cheers, and the first image came in, way ahead of schedule for me, but right on the mark for data coming in at 05:31..

I have to admit I wondered just how feasible this landing was and admit to a certain level of scepticism. BUT… this is just freakin awesome, I haven’t been this excited about space exploration since I watched the Apollo 11 LM land on the moon as a 9 year old!. America, the world is proud of you, take a bow.

Fantastic!
NASA occasionally blows it, and loses a probe, but when the get it right, they tend to get it VERY right. (Opportunity is STILL operative after what, 6 years, when it was only supposed to last 30 days???)

I was a bit skeptical everything would go right with all the rube goldberg stuff too, but I stayed up to watch NASA-TV last night, and I’m just in awe. I haven’t really felt like this since I was six when we landed Eagle on the moon… A lot of people have been voicing the same feeling.

But, sigh, I’ve also have all ready ran into the “1.5 billion dollars for pretty pictures that look like arizona?” train of thought. ugh. They think we shoot a billion dollars into space for nothing.

That billion and a half dollars was spent on jobs here on earth, supporting families, was NOT outsourced to Mars. grumble grumble.

When we have one data point (the earth) it’s hard to make any predictions. The future of humanity and the earth depend on our study of other planets.

But when can we expect to see results (pos or neg) from experiments? Is there any data that will come in soon or do we have to wait months for some hard evidence, life or otherwise, water or otherwise?

Neil @17 I was disappointed with the poor journalism and coverage by the BBC. The story has already disappeared from their news front page. It also dawned on me what a load of dupes we are in the UK. The Olympics cost £9billion to stage, or $12.5billion approximately. Five times the cost of building and putting Curiosity on Mars. We pay about the equivalent of $200 per year per household to the BBC just for a licence to watch to the infantile muck they pump out. America has a priceless national asset now and the UK has a pile of worthless white elephants.

Opportunity has been exploring the Meridiani region of Mars since landing in January 2004. It arrived at the Cape York section of the rim of Endeavour Crater in August 2011, and has been studying rock and soil targets on Cape York since then.

So Opportunuity has survived an amazing eight earth years and five martian winters.

The main rover’s home site also notes that Opportunity is 2,944 Sols i.e. martian days (a bit longer than earth ones) past its warranty.

Spirit only succumbed in the past year or so and thus very nearly lasted as long too.

We need to come up with a new description for high tech information.”Space Age Technology” sounds pretty old hat since we have been going to space for 50 years.
Any good candidates out their geeks? Mars age technology? Higgs age?

It concerns me that nobody vetted Curiosity. I don’t think she was even born on Mars. Why won’t she release her birth certificate? I’ll bet she’s gay and an illegal there to destroy good wholesome, Martian family values.

And honestly, I’m proud NASA could make all that happen. Mars deserves it!

Love that you mentioned the look on Amy’s face: it was fantastic during the last couple of minutes, perfect picture of excitement, suspense, and finally delight. Thanks to everyone in the hangout, really enjoyed it.

The hangout was great – thanks! Another thing that was very cool about all of this was the degree of transparancy and access that the “rest of us” got through the work you and your gang have done to help bring the public into this. ROCK!

Actually, Phil, Martian citizenship is a drawn out legal process that can decades for your typical manual rover. This rover is more qualified for the technical professions, but it will still be an ordeal before it can prove its sincere love for its new home. And then, of course, is the ever-present giaphobia in Martian society. Its lessened some since the cease fire signed by Flash Gordon and transmitted back through time along with the historical documentaries, but there are still some major holdouts, including Sarkoja in her long standing hatred of John Carter.

Riftmann @ #16 said: “But, sigh, I’ve also have all ready ran into the “1.5 billion dollars for pretty pictures that look like arizona?” train of thought. ugh. They think we shoot a billion dollars into space for nothing. That billion and a half dollars was spent on jobs here on earth, supporting families, was NOT outsourced to Mars. grumble grumble.”

While it’s true that the money has gone into the pockets of people here on Earth, the fact remains that what they built is now sitting on Mars. In other words, it’s not just where the money has gone, we also have to consider where the infrastructure has gone too. If this money had been spent on building schools or houses (for example), the money would again have gone into the pockets of people on Earth, but what they build would *also* have been available for ongoing use here on Earth.

As it happens, I don’t agree with the people who make these arguments. I think space exploration is good both for itself and for what it can lead to. But the people who make these arguments deserve correct arguments in response.

We started out in the Google hangout, which was cool, but there weren’t enough shots of our buddy Steve at JPL so we switched to the JPL feed.
MEGA COOL.
I so wish I was there. I so wish high school physics hadn’t kicked my butt, and I could be a rocket scientist. Maybe in another life.
In the meantime, so glad to have Bad Astronomer here to keep an eye on these things.

For the Aussie ABC TV Lateline program report and interview with former astronaut & later NASA admin John Grunsfeld. First one is the initial news coverage, second one the John Grunsfeld interview. Thought they were pretty good. For those who don’t know :

It is interesting to think about the meaning of “Live” transmission of an event like the landing of Curiosity. We were all glued to the broadcast, learning of things that had happened 14 minutes earlier, but that nature had kept from us in accordance to her laws! Truly amazing.

Slightly off topic: I recently saw a blog post somewhere (maybe it was actually a news article?) that included an interactive “map” of the US budget as a way of showing just how small NASA’s budget is in relation to everything else. I was thinking it was this blog, but I can’t seem to find it. It was definitely a pro-science source, so I’m hoping someone else here saw it, too. Does anyone happen to know what I’m talking about?